PORT-AU-PRINCE, 12 February 2004 — At the Liberty beauty salon in Port-au-Prince, two hairdressers sit in the hope that the electricity will soon return. “We wait for electricity. We wait for water. We wait for peace. We wait for war,” says one. Worried that she has said too much, she refuses to give her name, fearing the prescience of her throwaway remark and the implications that could come with it.
For Haiti was Tuesday on the verge of civil war. In the last five days anti-government rebels have taken around a dozen towns around the country in bloody battles that have claimed at least 42 lives. Meanwhile government supporters in Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haitien, built flaming barricades to keep rebels at bay, according to radio reports.
With the future of the president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in the balance and little indication of who will replace him, those who have fled the captured towns wait anxiously for news that they can return.
Men with rifles patrol the grounds of human rights organizations.
Rumors of towns fallen and recaptured are born and die in the space of a conversation. With government supporters and rebels both armed and not in uniform it is impossible to know whose side anyone is on.
No wonder, then, that the United Nations Tuesday warned of an imminent humanitarian disaster, and academics in the capital were warning of carnage and the potential for massacres.
Outside the tax office, where Emmanuel waits with his typewriter to tap out official-looking letters for the public, there is a nervous calm.
“Everyone knows who is to blame for this situation but many of us are too scared to say,” he said.
Even the government admits it does not have control.
“The national police alone cannot re-establish order,” the prime minister, Yvon Neptune, said on Monday after the police took back the town of St Marc. Calling the uprising an “act of terrorism”, Neptune said the “violence is tied to a coup d’etat”.
The government has branded it a coup but its opponents insist it is a popular uprising, rooted in the clampdown on democracy imposed by President Aristide, and the desperate economy over which he presides.
“It’s not spontaneous,” said Jean-Claude Bajeux, the director of the Ecumenical Center For Human Rights and a staunch opponent of Aristide, referring to the events of the last week. “It’s been fermenting for many years. People are fed up with this kind of government and there is a possibility that some of them will get out of control.”
Opposition groups date the source of the problem back to the parliamentary elections in 2000, which they claim were rigged in favor of Aristide’s party, Famni Lavalas. Unimpressed by the conduct of the ballot many foreign donors withdrew aid, further entrenching the dismal poverty of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.
Now they are demanding that Aristide, whose term does not run out until 2006, resigns immediately. The president has refused to step down but has promised legislative elections — a promise he made last year but has yet to keep.
